Later On

Interesting article, which begins:

Barack Obama has said we need a “Google for government.” It’s a nice line, but what does it mean? Federal agencies have been online since the mid-’90s. Obama’s first crack at a Google-for-government law led to USAspending.gov, a budget tracker that looked like everything else the feds had put up on the Web—until I saw one geek-speak phrase on the home page, so small I almost missed it: API Documentation. To understand its significance, let me tell you how I got subway schedules on my iPhone.

Just a few days after Apple’s iPhone launched, a trip planner for the San Francisco Bay Area’s subway system, BART, appeared in the iTunes application store, which sells iPhone and iPod software for download. User reviews were mixed. But I was still floored. How could a local government agency move so quickly?

Turns out, it didn’t. In 2007, Google engineers asked public-transit agencies across the country to submit their arrival and departure data in a simple, standard, open format—a text file, basically, with a bunch of numbers separated by commas—so Google Maps could generate bus and subway directions. A handful of agencies, including BART, decided to go a step further and publish that raw data online. Once they did that, any programmer could grab the data and write a trip planner, for any platform.

“It’s not 1995,” BART’s Web-site manager, Timothy Moore, explained. “A single Web site is not the endgame anymore. People are planning trips on Google, they’re using their iPhones. Because we opened up our schedule, we are in those places.”

A couple weeks after that first BART application appeared, a new trip planner went live. This one, called iBART, was a thing of beauty. Free, too. It was written by two former high-school buddies—Ian Leighton, a sophomore at UC Berke­ley, and David Hodge, a sophomore at the University of Southern California. Forty thousand people downloaded the program in just a few weeks. …

Continue reading.

Nice article in the new issue of The Atlantic, which begins:

An online reviewer of a new cocktail bar in Boston recently wrote, “The real highlight of this place is their ability to give you what you want, even when you don’t know what that is.”

The bar is called Drink, and I stopped in with a friend right after it opened, last fall. It has a clean, almost apothecary spareness, with lots of sharp angles and galvanized steel and slate. No bottles are on display. Spirits are measured from stainless-steel jiggers that resemble beakers, and the aromatic bitters are kept in eyedroppers, for precise dispensing. And there’s no cocktail list. The idea is that your bartender is your pharmacist and, after a brief chat, will prescribe something based on your needs and past preferences. (Pharmacy is evidently ascendant in modern cocktail culture; in the past year, Apothecary opened in Philadelphia, and Apothéke in New York.)

We found seats next to the ice station, where our bartender was doing an admirable imitation of Tony Perkins in Psycho, attacking a massive block of ice with a frightful-looking pick and afflicting those in the vicinity with small, sleety squalls. Other tools were arrayed on a white towel, like an exhibit of Civil War medical instruments: three-pronged ice tongs, dull knives, a wooden mallet. After carving out several fist-sized hunks of ice, she came over to take our order. Her diagnostic abilities were not yet fully honed, however, and I ended up self-prescribing an Old-Fashioned, with extra bitters. The drink that arrived was exactly the healing tonic I’d hoped for, with a perfect balance of sweet and bitter and the alcohol’s sharpness, none bullying the others—and such beautiful ice! …

Continue reading.

From the Center on American Progress via email:

Before President-elect Obama can institute his health care reform agenda, Congress must address some unfinished business from the Bush era. On Wednesday and Thursday, the House will consider the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) reauthorization measure. In 2007, despite broad bipartisan support and the urging of governors, President Bush vetoed two bills that would have extended health care coverage to some 10 million children.Congress aims to fix that problem. The new legislation ”will become law in the fairly near term,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) said, predicting that Congress will pass the measure despite conservative opposition. In fact, Obama has already begun working with Congress to develop affordable health care reforms. The President-elect’s stimulus package, for instance, includes more federal funds for Medicaid, subsidies to help “recently laid-off workers pay to retain their health insurance through COBRA,” and a provision “that would seek to computerize all medical records within five years.” While progressives are working to build bipartisan support for these measures, some conservatives have started laying the groundwork for a misinformation campaign to undermine long-term reform. Since Obama’s election victory in November, conservative politicians and pundits have been actively filling the nation’s leading newspapers with editorials misrepresenting the consequences and implications of expanding access to affordable health care coverage for all Americans. Last week, the Center for American Progress Action Fund released a new report identifying and debunking the right-wing’s most widely circulated myths about reform.

MYTH — HEALTH REFORM WILL LIMIT PATIENT CHOICE:

Read the rest of this entry »

Though, probably, it’s a combination. Matthew Yglesias:

James Pethokoukis writes for US News about “hysterical” liberal reactions to the Obama stimulus plan:

Some of their greatest hysterical hits: 1) “The economic plan he’s offering isn’t as strong as his language about the economic threat,” wrote NY Times columnist Paul Krugman. “In fact, it falls well short of what’s needed”; 2) the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank founded by Obama transition co-chair John Podesta, said the Obama plan was chock-full of “special interest favorites” and “long-discredited conservative proposals”; 3) Sen. Tom Harkin said Obamanomics “still looks a little more to me like trickle-down,” invoking a Reagan-era economic invective that liberals love to hurl; and 4) Nancy Pelosi, who seems to actually believe the Obama campaign spin that the Bush tax cuts somehow caused the recession, blurted out this gem: “Put me down as clearly as you possibly can as one who wants to have those tax cuts for the wealthiest in America repealed.” Duly noted, Madam Speaker.

Here’s what CAP’s Will Straw actually wrote:

To ensure that public money is not irresponsibly wasted, the legislation must break away from special-interest politics and conservative filibustering. Public money should be spent wisely and in the most effective way to address our economic woes. A rapid and aggressive economic plan must not be obstructed by demands for pet projects from either side of the congressional aisle or long-discredited conservative proposals such as permanent tax cuts for the rich.

In short, Straw said it would be undesirable for congress to modify Obama’s plan by letting special interests add long-discredited proposals such as permanent tax cuts for the rich. He didn’t say that Obama’s plan includes discredited permanent tax cuts for the rich because, you know, it doesn’t include any.

David Sirota:

Back in December, I published a newspaper column looking at a little-noticed Federal Reserve Bank report showing that the Bankruptcy Bill of 2005 is now causing 32,000 foreclosures every quarter. Well, now there’s a move afoot on Capitol Hill to amend bankruptcy laws to finally help homeowners and reshape the fundamentally unfair dynamics afflicting the economy – and you can help make this key reform a reality.

Here’s the Democratic Dear Colleague letter I just got my hands on that is being circulated in the House:

Dear Chairman Frank, Obey and Spratt:A record ten percent of all American homeowners with mortgages are either facing foreclosure or otherwise delinquent on their payments. Credit Suisse now estimates that 8.1 million families will lose their homes to foreclosure by the end of 2012. If the recession becomes severe, which seems increasingly possible every day, the number of foreclosures could rise to 10.2 million. Current voluntary efforts to modify delinquent mortgages are simply not working. Earlier this week, the chief regulator of national banks acknowledged that most U.S. mortgages modified in a voluntary effort to keep struggling borrowers in their homes and stem foreclosures fell back into delinquency within six months.

Voluntary mortgage modifications do not work in part because many mortgages have been securitized, which makes reaching an agreement among all those who have an interest in a mortgage extremely difficult. The problem is further compounded by the fact that some investors have sued while others have threatened to sue servicers if they modify these loans.

That is why the January stimulus package must include a provision to allow judicial modification of mortgages on primary residences. Under current bankruptcy law virtually every type of loan can be modified (including loans secured by a car, boat, farm or vacation home), except home mortgages. By correcting this anomaly, Congress will help between one quarter and one third of homeowners facing foreclosure save their homes. In addition, many others will be in a better position to negotiate a consensual agreement with their lenders, knowing that juducial modification is available. And, this measure will not cost American taxpayers a single penny.

Sincerely,

Giving bankruptcy judges the power to modify the terms of home loans would follow in the best tradition of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal – the tradition that “gives a group a market power it did not have before,” as John Kenneth Galbraith noted in his theory of the “countervailing power.”

Clearly, banks have had way too much power in the last few years, and the market has become wildly distorted. By empowering bankruptcy judges to renegotiate loans on fairer terms, the government can address this market distortion by creating a “countervailing power” – one that represents homeowners…

Continue reading.

Thomas Ricks replays an interview with Obama from a year ago. Very interesting. His post begins:

Fareed Zakaria interviewed Barack Obama last summer on his CNN show, and re-ran the interview last month. It was only recently, I am embarrassed to say, that I got around to reading the transcript of this terrific session. If you haven’t read it, you should. It is the best summary of the Obaman world view I’ve seen, more instructive than reading a month of op-ed yammerings. Despite my pops at Obama on this blog, I am consistently impressed by his breadth and poise.

Here are the comments that especially struck me, with my introductions in bold:

Stop snubbing Russia, even if Putin is a hooligan. “Look. If we’re going to do something about nuclear proliferation — just to take one issue that I think is as important as any on the list — we’ve got to have Russia involved.” A little respect goes a long way.

Bring China more into the international conversation. “[W]e have to engage and get them involved and bought-in into dealing with some of these transnational problems.”

Enough with the Vietnam overhang. “The Vietnam War had drawn to a close when I was fairly young. And so, that wasn’t formative for me in the way it was, I think, for an earlier generation.” …

Continue reading.

Interesting article by Michael C. Dorf, the Robert S. Stevens Professor of Law at Cornell University. It begins:

Security experts and legal advisers have urged President-elect Barack Obama to give up his beloved Blackberry. Obama is reluctant. “I’m still clinging to my BlackBerry,” he said last week. “They’re going to pry it out of my hands.”

The President-elect has explained that as President, he will be surrounded by people who–despite his best efforts–will be tempted to tell him only what he wants to hear. His Blackberry, he contends, would enable him to stay in touch with a wider group.

No doubt there is something to that point, but as a “Crackberry” myself, I suspect that part of Obama’s problem is simply personal: Once one gets used to the constant availability of the sorts of applications that run on a Blackberry, iPhone or comparable device, doing without them feels like a form of isolation.

Obama appears to be losing the fight over his Blackberry partly because of legal concerns. Lawyers worry that whatever messages he sends or receives will eventually become a matter of public record under the Presidential Records Act (“PRA”) of 1978. Their concern is legitimate, but as I shall argue in this column, that fact may suggest that our federal record-keeping laws are out of step with the ways in which people now communicate.

Security Concerns

To begin, it may not be possible for the new President to use his Blackberry–for email, text messages, or as a mobile telephone–without running an unacceptably high risk that his communications would be intercepted…

Continue reading.

Digby has an excellent post, from which the following is taken. But read the entire post.

I would suggest that Obama contemplate one little thing before he decides to try to find “middle ground” on torture. It is a trap. If he continues to torture in any way or even tacitly agrees to allow it in certain circumstances, the intelligence community will make sure it is leaked. They want protection from both parties and there is no better way to do it than to implicate Obama. And the result of that will be to destroy his foreign policy.

If the man who represents the second chance this country’s been given around the world to repudiate the horrors of the Bush years is revealed to have perpetuated the same horrors, his credibility and foreign policy will be in shambles. And there are many people buried in the intelligence and military establishments who would be happy to make sure that happens.

Obama said today on Stephanopoulos that he doesn’t want to look backwards but that Eric Holder could conceivably find something that must be prosecuted. (Good luck with those hearings, dude.) And he said that closing Guanatanamo was a difficult matter that would probably have to be dealt with by creating some new hybrid justice system. Of course, the Bush administration did that too with the military commissions, and they haven’t exactly worked out too well. But hey, the people languishing in Gitmo for years can wait a few more for the next shiny new justice system to be proven useless too. No hurry there.

As Greenwald discusses today, Obama is doing what all Democrats in my adult lifetime have always done — he is working as hard as he can to prove that he isn’t captive to his left. (You would think that the fact that the left is the law and order faction on this issue would at least make some of them scratch their heads.) And he seems to be doing a good job of it — even Pat Buchanan is effusive in his praise of Obama for making sure that everyone knows he isn’t “Reverend Wright’s man.”

But I’m not sure that’s what’s required right now. The nation is confused and scared about their economic security. They are embarrassed and angry at what the Republicans did. In fact, it seems that I heard somebody recently talking about how they desperately wanted … change. I guess that’s a word that’s open to interpretation, but it seems to me that it’s at least possible that they meant they wanted Obama to change the policies of the Bush administration.

Robert Parry writes:

With only 10 days left before George W. Bush leaves office, the Washington Establishment – and its chief mouthpiece the Washington Post – are trying to stymie any meaningful accountability for the outgoing administration and thus cover up for their own complicity in Bush’s crimes and incompetence.

The latest example is the Post’s front-page article on Jan. 10 which offers a one-sided defense of torture in the guise of discussing how President-elect Barack Obama is under pressure over his expressed goal of prohibiting abusive interrogation of detainees in the “war on terror.”

The Post article presents those interrogation policies as an undisputed success, even quoting Vice President Dick Cheney as something of an unbiased expert in declaring that the harsh tactics “have been absolutely essential to maintaining our capacity to interfere with and defeat all further attacks against the United States.”

Throughout the article, Obama’s opposition to torture is portrayed as simply campaign rhetoric meant to appease the left-wing Democratic base and some human rights activists. Meanwhile the pro-torture position is described as realistic, hard-headed and patriotic.

“If Obama goes ahead with his plan to scrap the special CIA [interrogation] program, he could expose himself to criticism that he did not do all he could to prevent another terrorist attack,” the Post article states. It then cites a “white paper” from Bush’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence about the supposed successes of the interrogation tactics, including the simulated drowning of waterboarding.

The DNI’s “white paper” credited the waterboarding of an al-Qaeda operative known as Abu Zubaydah for forcing out the first information about Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s role in the 9/11 attacks and intelligence that helped capture another high-ranking operative, Ramzi Binalshibh.

Though the Post story appeared in the news columns – not in its reliably neoconservative editorial section – the article read more like a pro-torture opinion piece masquerading as news. The Post included no counter-arguments against the alleged value of waterboarding and other tactics which have been widely condemned around the world as torture.

If the Post had any interest in balance, it might have included at least some references to experts who have disputed the value of extracting information through torture.

For example, Lt. Gen. John Kimmons, head of Army intelligence, stated in 2006 that “No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that.”

Or the Post might have mentioned …

Continue reading.

A new blog urging against a troop build-up in Afghanistan until we really know what we’re doing and what our goals are and have a plan in place that will meet those goals. More war may not be the answer.

The GOP is desperately trying to convince people that the New Deal “failed,” saying “many” historians and economists agree—though they don’t name any, whereas the number who say the New Deal was a success are legion and include Nobel laureates. Adam Cohen in the NY Times writes:

On Christmas Eve, the conservative pundit Monica Crowley argued on Fox News that instead of rescuing America from the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt’s spending on public works made it worse. She insisted that this bizarre claim was confirmed by “all kinds of studies and academic work.”

The show’s host backed her up. “Yes,” said Gregg Jarrett, “I think historians pretty much agree on that.” In the same vein, a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece said F.D.R. helped turn “a panic into the worst depression of modern times.” Now, as Congress begins to debate President-elect Barack Obama’s ambitious economic stimulus plan, this anti-New Deal talking point is popping up all over.

Conservatives have railed against the New Deal from the start. In 1934, H. L. Mencken was already decrying it as “a saturnalia of expropriation and waste.” When F.D.R. ran for re-election in 1936, a headline in William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers insisted that “Moscow Backs Roosevelt.”

But Americans were not fooled. They knew F.D.R. was on their side in a way that Herbert Hoover and his fellow free-marketers hadn’t been. They could see first-hand the good that Roosevelt’s jobs programs were doing for the Depression’s victims and the slow but unmistakable improvements in the economy.

In the 1934 midterm elections, the voters delivered their first verdict on the New Deal, expanding the Democrats’ margins in Congress. In 1936, F.D.R. won in a bigger landslide than he had four years earlier. By 1940, the Republican nominee, Wendell Willkie, was supporting much of Roosevelt’s social welfare and regulatory regime.

Anti-New Deal rhetoric has never disappeared from American political life. When Barry Goldwater ran for president in 1964, he attacked President Dwight Eisenhower for having presided over a “dime store New Deal.” But in recent years, the attacks have heated up.

At the start of the Bush administration, conservatives talked openly about rolling back the New Deal. They were trying to unravel the regulatory state, including protections for workers, consumers and investors. They were also promoting a favorite cause of Wall Street’s: privatizing Social Security, the crown jewel of the New Deal.

These days the public is in no mood, given the high costs of deregulation in the mortgage industry and the Bernard Madoff scandal, for more talk about dismantling regulations and federal oversight. But today, the new focus is Mr. Obama’s stimulus package. If F.D.R.’s New Deal spending made things worse, it follows that the Obama administration should not make the same mistake.

The anti-New Deal line is wrong as a matter of economics. F.D.R.’s spending programs did help the economy and created millions of new jobs. The problem, we now know, is not that F.D.R. spent too much priming the pump, but rather that he spent too little. It was his decision to cut back on spending on New Deal programs that brought about a nasty recession in 1937-38.

The second problem is that the criticism overlooks the  …

Continue reading.

I offer the “+” because presumably he’ll pay a little more attention than Bush did. But Ezra Klein notes:

Tom Philpott delivers a nice reality check on the Obama campaign’s almost wholly disappointing approach to food policy. Despite the momentary flash of promise when Obama mentioned Michael Pollan’s work in an interview, his subsequent appointments and statements haven’t demonstrated an evident commitment to understanding farm policy as a question of food rather than a question of food producer interests. Indeed, Obama’s agricultural adviser, Marshall Matz, is a partner at a law and lobbying firm that represents agricultural interests against federal regulators. And he also served as co-chair of Obama’s rural outreach committee, which neatly places him on the wrong side of another problem in farm policy: The tendency to understand it as an issue that’s mainly of interest to rural Americans who produce food rather than urban or suburban residents who eat food. That’s two for two.

But these are not ideological fights. It’s not the product of a disagreement between food advocates and Obama. Farm policy is classic case of interest group politics. It’s a low priority issue. There’s little media attention or non-profit oversight. A small group — in this case, producers of food — is directly affected and loudly vocal. They dominate the issue and bend the outcomes to their benefit. The broader community of folks who eat food — all of us, more or less — don’t clearly see the connection between policy and plate and so pay little attention to federal action. Our interests are largely lost because there’s little in the way of political reward for serving the silent. Expecting Obama to change that because he read a magazine article is a sucker’s bet. Obama’s picks are traditional because he’s a rational politician, and he’s subject to the same incentives all politicians are subject to. The answer isn’t in better, or more enlightened, politicians. It’s in changing the surrounding political incentives. People who want farm policy to become food policy need to find ways to become louder.

On a related note, there’s a new blog — Obama Foodorama — following all things at the intersection of Barack and food. And when I say all things, I mean everything from ag policy to Obama’s visit to Ben’s Chili Bowl (one of DC’s most overrated institutions, incidentally). Check it out.

Krugman is an economist, and one who won a Nobel prize. His advice on the economic stimulus is well worth serious consideration, particularly given what a disaster awaits a plan that does not work (for example, by being too damn timorous). Read his column today. It makes sense, no?

From The Scientist:

Just when you thought nobody could be worse than the National Institutes of Health at managing financial conflicts of interest among trial investigators…

The Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services released a report today that indicates a pretty severe lack of oversight over at the Food and Drug Administration. The report found that only one percent of the almost 27,000 clinical investigators contracted by the agency in 2007 disclosed a financial interest. In 42% of clinical trials, the FDA never even received the financial disclosure forms from participating investigators that the agency mandates. The FDA not only failed to address these shortcomings, in 20% of the trials where investigators did report a financial conflict, the FDA took no action. In 31% of trials where researchers did submit financial conflict documentation, FDA reviewers didn’t even indicate that they read the forms.

If this isn’t enough to make you smack your forehead and send your morning coffee spraying from one nostril, the FDA also apparently told the inspector general …

Continue reading.

The Food and Drug Administration does almost nothing to police the financial conflicts of doctors who conduct clinical trials of drugs and medical devices in human subjects, government investigators are reporting.

Moreover, the investigators say, agency officials told them that trying to protect patients from such conflicts was not worth the effort.

Read the rest of this entry »

As The Wife pointed out, this is my new obsession. Here are photos of the new stainless-clad carbon steel Japanese knife:

The knife is above, photographed after using it for a week or so. Click image and then click result for full size of the photo. If you look at the edge, you’ll see where the stainless cladding stops short of the edge, on a wavy line.

I have found that most US knives, properly sharpened for kitchen use, have an 18º primary bevel (the first thing ground and the deepest bevel), then on that a 20º secondary bevel, much shorter, and finally a 22º bevel that is quite short and forms the cutting edge. Finer and finer hones (waterstones for Japanese knives) are used as the bevel progresses and the final bevel is cut with a very fine grit and then perhaps stropped on leather to polish the edge.

But a Japanese knife, so far as I can tell, goes with a single very narrow bevel: 15º on my knife (and it’s a double-sided bevel, not a single sided bevel as with some sashimi knives). This makes an extremely sharp edge but also an edge that’s somewhat delicate: no cutting frozen foods, bones, or hard things like a pineapple or butternut squash (the rind, not the interior). But when you’re cutting vegetables: what a pleasure!

I just found a site that offers sharpening tools and services for Japanese knives: Japanese Knife Sharpening. If you have a Japanese knife, I would think this is the way to get it sharpened if you don’t want to do it yourself. A standard sharpening service would probably grind a standard edge.

I’m tempted to send one of my David Boye chef knives to this service and have them grind a Japanese edge on it.

I’m disappointed that Obama seems to have no interest in prosecuting “crimes that occurred in the past.” Taken logically, this would mean no prosecution of crimes at all: all crimes that have been committed were committed in the past, after all. What he’s really saying is that he has no interest in prosecuting crimes that were committed by those high in government: people like that can order up murder, torture, domestic spying, illegal imprisonment, and the like and get away with it because…  because…   hmmm. Because that sort of thing is okay? No…

In fact, he’s making a big bad mistake. He could construct an investigation and prosecution by an independent and bipartisan commission made up of people of integrity and honesty and give that commission the legal powers it needs. But he doesn’t seem to be interested. Very, very bad.

Steve Benen has a very good post on this question, and quotes Chris Hayes. Well worth reading: click the link.

UPDATE: And also read Hilzoy’s fine post on the topic. Excellent.

A very good start would be to close the prison at Guantánamo and also the gulag of “black” prisons in other countries. Obama is saying that closing Guantánamo is difficult—well, you asked for the job, Barack, so don’t start complaining already. Don’t tell us it’s difficult, tell us how you’re going to do it. Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent has a good post:

President-elect Barack Obama seems to think it’s kind of hard to close Guantanamo Bay:

It is more difficult than I think a lot of people realize and we are going to get it done but part of the challenge that you have is that you have a bunch of folks that have been detained, many of whom who may be very dangerous who have not been put on trial or have not gone through some adjudication.

Luckily, the Center for Constitutional Rights is going to come out with a report later today providing a specific path for shutting the detention facility down. Says executive director Vincent Warren:

“On the seventh anniversary of the arrival of the first detainees it turns out the single most important factor in determining who still remains at Guantánamo is nationality— whether we’re talking about the approximately 60 men who cannot be returned home and need other countries to take them in or about which countries have had the clout to get their people out. Closing the place down is not the great challenge it’s being made out to be. Let’s do it and be done with it.”

The report should be out by the afternoon. More later.

Glenn Greenwald comments, somewhat bitterly:

… As Talk Left’s Jeralyn Merritt documents, Obama today rather clearly stated that he will not close Guantanamo in the first 100 days of his presidency.  He recited the standard Jack Goldsmith/Brookings Institution condescending excuse that closing Guantanamo is “more difficult than people realize.”  Specifically, Obama argued, we cannot release detainees whom we’re unable to convict in a court of law because the evidence against them is “tainted” as a result of our having tortured them, and therefore need some new system — most likely a so-called new “national security court” — that “relaxes” due process safeguards so that we can continue to imprison people indefinitely even though we’re unable to obtain an actual conviction in an actual court of law.

Worst of all, Obama (in response to Stephanopoulos’ asking him about the number one highest-voted question on Change.gov, first submitted by Bob Fertik) all but said that he does not want to pursue prosecutions for high-level lawbreakers in the Bush administration, twice repeating the standard Beltway mantra that “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards” and ”my instinct is for us to focus on how do we make sure that moving forward we are doing the right thing.”  Obama didn’t categorically rule out prosecutions — he paid passing lip service to the pretty idea that “nobody is above the law,” implied Eric Holder would have some role in making these decisions, and said “we’re going to be looking at past practices” — but he clearly intended to convey his emphatic view that he opposes “past-looking” investigations.  In the U.S., high political officials aren’t investigated, let alone held accountable, for lawbreaking, and that is rather clearly something Obama has no intention of changing…

They are out of control, IMHO. ThinkProgress notes:

Human Rights Watch said yesterday that “Israel’s military has fired artillery shells with the incendiary agent white phosphorus into Gaza and a doctor there said the chemical was suspected in the case of 10 burn victims who had skin peeling off their faces and bodies.” An Israeli military spokeswoman refused to comment on the charge, saying only that the army was acting “in accordance with international law.”

Dragon’s Blood is, naturally enough, a warm fragrance. The soap produced a fine lather with the Key Hole 3 Best, and of course the Slant did its usual terrific smooth-cutting job. A very smooth face welcomed the Draggon Noir aftershave. Good start to the week.